{"id":37648,"date":"2025-10-06T22:00:03","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T05:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/?p=37648"},"modified":"2025-10-03T20:49:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T03:49:12","slug":"251007-monitor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/251007-monitor\/","title":{"rendered":"Monitor Your Default Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"flex_column av_one_full  flex_column_div av-zero-column-padding first  avia-builder-el-0  avia-builder-el-no-sibling  \" style='border-radius:0px; '><section class=\"av_textblock_section \"  itemscope=\"itemscope\" itemtype=\"https:\/\/schema.org\/BlogPosting\" itemprop=\"blogPost\" ><div class='avia_textblock  '   itemprop=\"text\" ><p style=\"text-align: right;\">by Max Lucado<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-37650 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/251007_1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/251007_1.jpg 600w, https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/251007_1-300x150.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span id=\"en-NIV-16514\" class=\"text Prov-4-23\"><strong>Proverbs 4:23<\/strong> \u00a0Above all else, guard your heart,\u00a0 <\/span><span class=\"indent-1\"><span class=\"text Prov-4-23\">for everything you do flows from it.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Monitor your default thoughts. Most of us are unaware of the inner dialogue we carry on with ourselves each day. Appraisals. Criticisms. Assumptions. They are knee-jerk reactions. \u201cI\u2019m so stupid.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll never get this under control.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>When self-criticism or worry plays like a tape in your head, there is always a reason.\u00a0 Someone trained you to think this way. They are the result of injury after injury, influence after influence, regret after regret\u2014days, years, decades of immobilizing notions until a person cannot escape.<\/p>\n<p>Does the voice in your head speak with proper authority?\u00a0 Odds are good that many of your thoughts emerge from an unqualified origin. I hope you come to view each thought through the lens of God\u2019s Word. He, and he alone, has the authority to tell you how to think.<\/p>\n<h3>God Made Our Brains. He Can Retrain Our Brains.<\/h3>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-37576 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/time.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"198\" height=\"300\" \/>Stuck in your head? Hounded by regrets? Weighed down by worry? Change is possible! The thoughts that have characterized your past need not characterize the rest of your life.<\/p>\n<p>In\u00a0<em><strong>Tame Your Thoughts<\/strong><\/em>, Max explores three key thought-management tools and then applies them to the most common thought problems: worry, guilt, anxiety, and other types of mental quicksand that threaten to trap us. God loves us too much to let us lead a life marked by poor thinking. He has not left us alone in this battle of the mind.<\/p>\n<p>shared with permission<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Proverbs 4:23 \u00a0Above all else, guard your heart,\u00a0 for everything you do flows from it.<\/p>\n<p>Monitor your default thoughts. Most of us are unaware of the inner dialogue we carry on with ourselves each day. Appraisals. Criticisms. Assumptions. They are knee-jerk reactions. \u201cI\u2019m so stupid.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll never get this under control.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>When self-criticism or worry plays like a tape in your head, there is always a reason.\u00a0 Someone trained you to think this way. They are the result of injury after injury, influence after influence, regret after regret\u2014days, years, decades of immobilizing notions until a person cannot escape.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37650,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[148],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-upwords"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37648"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37651,"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37648\/revisions\/37651"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}